Diana Henry’s Love Affairs with Menus

The British cookbook author has embedded a lusty memoir in her latest recipe collection.

Diana Henry estimates that she’s hosted two hundred meals in the nine years she’s lived in her house, in North London. Experience hasn’t dispelled the romance, or the anxiety, that comes along with the desire to make every occasion special. Once, Henry was roasting a sea bass when a guest came into the kitchen and confided that her husband was having an affair. “I did want to sympathize but, really, I was more worried about overcooking the fish,” Henry writes, in “How to Eat a Peach,” her eleventh and most recent cookbook. Henry will get out a trestle table for a crab feast. She will start infusing prunes with Monbazillac wine a month early in order to serve, at a supper inspired by her memories of travelling in southwestern France, just the right apéritif. Reading her menus—one included fennel taralli; burrata with fennel, roasted peppers, anchovies, and capers; spaghetti and shellfish al cartoccio; and ricotta ice cream with candied lemon and pistachios—was enough, recently, to compel a normally well-mannered person to angle for an invitation. Alas, Henry’s two teen-age sons were studying for exams and needed quiet. It seemed only right to take her out for dinner.

Henry chose Brawn, a whitewashed small-plates restaurant in Bethnal Green. When her dining companion arrived, she was sitting at a wooden table in front of a high window with a blood-orange Negroni. “Gougères! ” she said, proffering a plate. “You don’t see them very often.” “How to Eat a Peach” is the culmination of a habit that Henry began as a sixteen-year-old on the coast of Northern Ireland, when she covered a school exercise book in gift wrap and began jotting down menus for meals she might someday, somewhere serve. There is a lusty memoir embedded amid the recipes. Pork rillettes are the spring of 1982, when she worked as an au pair for a family of Bordelais zookeepers: a patriarch who never spoke except to ask for salt, and a “bird-like grandma with her floral housecoats and heavily pencilled eyebrows,” distraught over the death of Romy Schneider. Tinga poblana is a bad breakup. Oysters mignonette is learning to like something after you’re far too old to think you might.

At Brawn, the menu was printed on a sheet of white paper. It took only a few seconds to decide: crab, mussels, scallop tartare, veal ragu, and lamb sweetbreads. “The food is almost, but not quite, coarse,” Henry said. “This is a love-life menu, honestly.” She ordered a bottle of white wine and reminisced about a boyfriend she’d had as a foreign-exchange student in France. His recipe for crêpes dentelles remains accessible, even if the urgency of their affair is lost to time. Henry said, “I reread D. H. Lawrence last year, and just laughed.”

Her ambitions as a hostess have dimmed only slightly since the time, in high school, that she invited five classmates over for a candlelit supper of pineapple water ice. “I used to do stupid things,” she recalled later. “Make tortelloni for ten—as a starter, had to cook the rest of the meal as well—all in one day, that kind of thing. Guests turned up thirty minutes early one night, and I was still in my underwear, lightly dusted with flour, pinching pasta dough. I’m not that mad now.”

One of the most literary of food writers, Henry will advise slicing the “tufty bit” off the base of a leek. You’re tempted to think that her instructions for making elderflower gin (“Close the jar and shake it every day for 1 week”) derive less from necessity than from appreciation for the perfect Anglo-Saxon imperative sentence. “Even just visualizing them being poured makes your shoulders drop,” she writes, of a dish that involves olive oil and copious amounts of honey. Beneath her hedonism, there is a liquid-heavy undercurrent of longing. “I could have filled the book twice over,” she said, spiralling pasta onto her fork. “I was writing it at a time in my life when I just wanted to go underwater.” She had recently split from her partner and was dealing with family illness. She sat at her desk from dusk until three o’clock in the morning, the only lit window in sight. “Everybody thinks this is sluttish,” she said. “I don’t get dressed all day. I’m in my pajamas. But there’s a blank screen, and that’s controllable.” One of the unanticipated pleasures of being single, she said, is reading, writing, and cooking as late into the night as she wants to.

It was almost midnight. The way to eat a peach is to halve it, pit it, slice it, and drop it into a glass of cold moscato. Henry saw a group of locals do that in a restaurant on the last night of her first trip to Italy, decades ago, and never forgot it. For the moment, she made do with panna cotta. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the May 14, 2018, issue, with the headline “Peachy.”